Ragtime education

This is not a story with a particular point, or punchline really,
just a few odd connections in my meaty brain.

In 11th grade, I got tired of English class, the way some people
get tired of jury duty, or herpes.

So I told the high school counselor I wanted to switch English-class
tracks from the "good student" track into the "not really good (rich),
but not actually dim or poor (Mexican)" track, since I assumed
(correctly) that this would mean less work and less bullshit.

The counselor was delighted by the idea of a student
basically scamming the system, and so he let me do whatever I wanted.
So I happily stayed in the blah-English track for the rest of high
school. The whole experience was extremely educational,
and in none of the ways that the school system intended. (I love
it when a plan comes together!)

A notable part of the laff-riot was that early in 12th grade year,
the State of California Education And Mosquito-Abatement Authority
decreed that there must be another round of Standardized Testing.
Standardized Tests up until then had consisted of a few days of unobtrusive
multiple choice tests, and each year varied from the previous really just in
having a totally different acronymic name each time.

But this year was
to be different -- the 12th graders would be tested, with essay questions.
When you test 9th graders, you can just tut tut at how dim they are and
move on, since We The Community still have many long years left to
teach them.
But when it's 12th graders, the test results practically write themselves
up as angry headlines about how "People are GRADUATING HIGH SCHOOL
without knowing _____!!!".

And the fact that there would be an essay section instilled true
panic in the local school-district administration.
One pictures hands shakily working Selectric typewriters, sending around
terrified memoes. Of course, we the students didn't give a rat's ass.

All curricula in sight were scrapped under school-district orders, with
the incidental explanation that the curricula were not being
scrapped, just augmented, in a special kind of augmentation that means
throwing away the thing you're augmenting to make room for the other thing.
The other thing was: teaching to the test.

The English classes especially were
"augmented" from their usual discussions of inane plot-points in
The Scarlet Letter, instead to administering practice-runs of the
dozen kinds of prompts that could be thrown at students in the essay section
of the Impending Doom/Test.

I don't remember terribly much about those prompts except that
one night's homework for everyone in the class was some a prompt
instructing the respondant/student/victim to write a mock letter to
their city councilman about I've-forgotten-what.
The results from the students looked a bit worse
than
this mess (which is what dredged up this memory in the first place,
the other day).

Our teacher's reaction to this was merely to announce that she was shocked,
shocked at how bad our attempts-at-letters were. We, the
students were shocked (shocked!!!) by the fact that she had not considered that
there had been exactly no letter-writing in the entire curriculum (the curriculum
being that thing she was supposed to know about, what with meetings and
memoes and things); and this being
the 1980s, of course we had no outside experience of letter-writing,
so of course it was all very hit-and-miss for us, and that the results were no
more shocking that what would be expected if we were asked to compose
lyrics to a ragtime jig.

Before anyone could say this to her (in phrasing that have probably
started out with "Oh yeah?!"), she showed us what a trooper she was by telling
us that she had written something to that prompt too! (It's
backwards day or something! Will my mind survive this role-reversal?
Tear down the walls, man!)

She read it to us, her little essay.

It was bad.

It was bad.

It was poetry-slam bad. It was "open mic" bad.

We knew it. We looked at eachother and recognized that we all knew it.
And she had no idea.

And that was when we, as a class, realized that
Hell is full and the dead are walking the Earth, teaching school.

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My son's entering 6th grade next year, and the same kinds of last-minute curriculum changes still happen all of the time. The entire month of January at his school was spent in prep for the Michigan Educational Assessment Program tests. (His school does score well on the test, but only though coaching like this.)

What I've done is do a bit of curriculum editing of my own. He brings home work and I advise him on what's going to be important, and what's not. I give him extra work where I want to enhance t